A blog for reviews… that's really not much of a blog

Foreword: I worried about whether or not I should make a review for this game….. for about 1 hour. I decided to write one because I did have a review for another title from the same company on this website, and the publishing of this review will be on my birthday! Yay! Jason’s turning old now!

On retrospect, this game, titled “elf no shugosha” or “Guardian of the Elves” wasn’t exactly up to par with their last title, Lost Phantom. In general, the character designs were similar and a lot of the gameplay elements are kept intact, but the story kinda loses quite a bit. However, I’m planning to discuss this in a bit more detail along with the Author’s comments for the game as well (Yep, he actually adds his own comments to the game!)

Summary: The Silver Darkness brings about the awakening of the Guardian of the Elves… that’s a saying passed down for generations in the elven society, but at least for Yuuto, he only remembers his name and the phrase “Guardian of the Elves” as he wakes up in an unknown forest being carried by people who he doesn’t know. His lack of memory will be the least of his problems as a large army from the Thousand Empire invade the forest, but he’s luckily saved by a group of elves who repel the fiends. He meets a beautiful elf named Siris who decides to take him in as a hostage, but finds out that he has the seeds to the World Tree, which bewilders everyone at the Elven camp.

That night, however, the same army invades the Elven Camp, and completely outnumbered, Yuuto steps in and offers to surrender in exchanging for no one being killed. While enraged at Yuuto’s actions, the chief of the camp decide to place Yuuto in charge of their town as he knew about the “Guardian of the Elves”, and Yuuto agrees to assist Siris in any way he can to restore the former glory that the elves once held.

Story Length: Moderate (20 hours; gameplay included)
Complete Story Clearing Difficulty: Slightly Difficult
Comments: Another relatively story-oriented game, except the fact that there are minor changes within the game mechanics and while the setting is the same as Lost Phantom, there are small differences as well. It’s almost as if this game is a “spin-off” of the more recent release… (or vice versa)Character Design Rating: 5/10
Story Rating: 4/10
Protagonist Rating: 3/10
Game Quality: Very Low
Overall Rating: 4/10
Rating Comments: So while not exactly that great of a game, I should still point out that even the author considers this one of his “failed projects” and even offers his apologies for it. Despite this, the scores are still pretty decent.

Character Design is “average”, but only because of the quantity of the characters rather than its quality. There was a couple of characters that did stand out, but in general, was pretty moderate. Now note that this doesn’t mean that the characters were plain: moderate =/= plain. It’s just that even as a doujin game, it would REALLY REALLY be nice to have voices for these characters.

Story also isn’t anything special, but should be commended for having its “plot twists” that we’ve seen in Lost Phantom. Lots of elements presented pretty subtly within the game make significant differences later in the story. Otherwise, the game was actually more on the plain side with your typical hero scoring bishoujos with very little transition, which was why this score is lower than it should be.

In reality, this translates to the protagonist as well, a character with a relatively vague background story who doesn’t seem especially protagonist-like at least in my eyes. While he wasn’t just randomly “picked” to become a protagonist, I really thought it would be nice if there was something other than his “vague background” that contributed towards him “standing out” somehow.

Character Summary: To be honest, most of the heroines presented didn’t really make too much of a difference, although some characters were shared while others “hinted” at future games. I’ll only cover the main ones because of this.

The boy full of justice, Yuuto is the protagonist of this game who wakes up in the forest with very little memories. Because of this, he is seen as strange by the elven community, who would have killed or taken him into slavery if it wasn’t for him knowing of a phrase called “Guardian of the Elves” in addition to having the seeds to the legendary “World Tree”, capable of bearing fruit that grants eternal life.

While everyone finds him strange at first, the Chief (who also doubles up as Siris’s grandfather) seems to place trust in this character, which he takes seriously to improve the elven camp and soon deliver independence and later domination.

I actually appreciated that he had a face unlike Ash from Lost Phantom. LOL

The beautiful elf who commands the army before Yuuto comes in, Siris is pretty much considered the “elven princess” both due to her looks and how she’s the grand-daughter of the chief. However, she herself doesn’t like this title, saying that their community is too small for her to be a princess while she herself doesn’t exactly live a luxurious life.

Siris is generally very brave and kind-hearted, but there is something that she is afraid of; small,dark, and enclosed spaces. While everyone including herself is unsure why this is the case, the game goes onto explaining why she has this fear.

Generally speaking, even as the main heroine, the game generally lacked the interaction with her and Yuuto, causing the romance between them to be quite shallow. This is quite significant since said “romance” between other characters were even worse. At least the game wasn’t stubborn on making romance a main focus of the game. (I’m looking at you, Lump of Sugar)

Weskule is probably a character you’re familiar with in Lost Phantom, and she makes an appearance as well. In addition to this, more of her identity is revealed in this game compared to Lost Phantom, which made it strange for her to even play a big role in Lost Phantom as she did. She IS a heroine for this game unlike Lost Phantom, however, and a playable character to boot.

Tristan seems to be this character’s name………. Hm? I feel a deja vu……

Wait… Isn’t this character’s name from Lost Phantom…. Trish?

(トリス) Trish…? (トリスタン) Tristan? Coincidence?

While unsure if the two characters are related, it’s true that they look very similar and may have resulted from the author’s laziness (lel). Like Trish in the more recent game, Tristan is quite solemn to her duties and responsible, and plays the role of the guard for the Prince of Graias, when the kingdom fell to the Thousand Empire.

Other than this… there wasn’t really much reason why I included her… xP

Orphina is this character’s name, who is one of the generals for the Thousand Empires and one of the last enemies you face when invading the country. She seems to be a dark elf, but fighting against the elves, which startles not only Yuuto, but the other elves as well. The fact that she is also an elf that no other elves know about adds to her mystery, when in reality, Orphina is essentially the most important character within the entire game.

Unfortunately for Orphina and for players, she does have an unavoidable rape scene (for the people who hate it), but it’s actually highly relevant to the story.

Sexual Content: Low

Comments: So the game has very similar mechanics as Lost Phantom, but excludes the “movement” portion. Instead, it seems that the timeframe for this game passes by “Months” instead of “Days”, and allows the maximum of 600 “turns, or months” before forcing a game-over. Otherwise, the battle systems are exactly the same, so I’d like to refer you to my other review for it. (Wow, much lazy)

The game also has the system of making the protagonist super-powerful, which was pretty fun and needed to actually clear the game. Even if you can’t…. the game had a good design. Let’s just keep it at that.

Though I’d like to mention that the story was a bit lacking. This is where I’d like to actually add in the author who is both the artist AND the scenario writer, named Kanazawa Kanata (Wait, why does this sound like a woman’s name? O_O;; Did I call a woman a man for the entirety of this review?) did apologize for both not developing the characters enough as well as making the entire story rather awkward. I do believe that because of this, he did improve greatly on Lost Phantom, which I found to be quite enjoyable. Apparently, he had other plans to have this story go, more of a cliche eroge-style, but wanted to create an original story (WOOOO! I LOVE YOU KANAZAWA KANATA) so he changed up his style, resulting in a relatively failure of a story, but I don’t care: it’s original and that’s what matters. THUMBS UP!

CG Score: 3/10. You might notice a lack of pictures on this review, and that’s because of the near zero of normal CGs I can use for the review. In reality, there’s only like 5 SFW CGs within this game; the rest are HCGs.
Music Score: 8/10. But damn the music is nice. Apparently, TAM Music Factory helped with the BGM, and while I’m not sure if this is the same as TAMUSIC, the doujin group who excels with string music, I’m definitely sharing some of the best ones with you guys.

Conclusion: An “okay” game that I found by enjoying the group’s recent game, I would recommend it only if you liked Lost Phantom and could tolerate its wacky combat system. Otherwise, I would suggest against playing this one.

Again for readers who may want to play this game:the savedata with maxed Funds/Troops/Food at Day 1 will be placed here:

Same instructions. Click on it, Right-Click Download, rename into “save1.dat” then place in your “savedata” folder (NOT “save” folder).

Remember read the prologue since it’s pretty long before using the maxed savedata.

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